Answer me a question, if we can sell arms to terrorists, to our own enemies, then you tell me why we can’t negotiate with those same terrorists for the return of our own people.
If our people aren’t worth it, if they aren’t worth more than the value we place on arm sales and political maneuvering, then you go right on and tell me what all the shouting is about over Benghazi. Go on, I’ll wait.
If our people aren’t worth four or five terrorists sitting in a Gitmo prison cell, then you tell me why we’ve spent the last twelve years in two wars, why we traded the lives of six thousand servicemen and why we killed hundreds of thousands Iraqis and Afghans to avenge three thousand Americans. Go on, tell me why it was okay for the previous administration take a hundred enemy lives for every one of ours, but it’s not acceptable for the current administration to trade five terrorists for the life of one American soldier – especially when we gave six American lives as a down payment looking for him after his disappearance. Why were the Americans who died on 911 any more valuable than Bowe Bergdahl?
And if Bergdahl is guilty of desertion, then don’t we owe it to those six dead soldiers to bring him home and make him account for his cowardice?
These people are so eaten up with hatred, their souls are so corrupted by their poisonous worldview, that instead of satisfaction at the return of their fellow countryman they feel only loathing – because they simply cannot stand to see Obama with a joyous Jani and Bob Bergdahl, announcing the safe repatriation of their son.
The staggering hypocrisy of John McCain continues unabated, the man is a disgrace to the uniform he once wore and the honor he swore to uphold. McCain, more than any other living American, should know what it’s like when governments value politics over their own citizens. Navy Lieutenant John McCain, if he still exists inside that wretched bitter old man, that John McCain more than any other should remember what it’s like to come home as a POW under a cloud of doubt and suspicion. But Vietnam was a long, long time ago and John McCain is a rich man now and more than willing to condemn others for his own sins.
Ted Cruz, a man who wants to be President of the United States, who wants to be the Commander in Chief, is the very epitome of these intractable sons of bitches. No other American embodies every horrible facet of the moral bankruptcy that is this corrupt selfish philosophy – unless it’s his father, the turd-blossom didn’t fall far from the horse’s ass in the Cruz family.
Cruz said, “What does this tell the terrorists? That if you capture a U.S. soldier, you can trade that soldier for five terrorists?”
Cruz went on to say the prisoner swap was “very disturbing.”
Disturbing?
What does it tell the terrorists?
This, this right here, is where we as a nation, need to say no more.
We need to stand up and say we’ve had enough. That not only are we sick and tired of being afraid of terrorists, but we’re even more tired of listening to the fearful cries of the other terrorists, the ones who practice being terrified as a political philosophy.
This madness, this crippling unreasoning fear, must be dragged into the heat of the sun and cauterized, before it kills us all.
What does it tell the terrorists?
Fourteen years we’ve been killing these cockroaches, we’ve killed thousands of them, we’ve killed their families, we’ve destroyed their country, we rooted them out of their strongholds, we hunted down their leader and shot him in the head and dumped his body into the sea.
And for what? So we can still be afraid?
All of this, all of these lost lives, all of the terrible terrible cost, all is for naught because we were willing to trade prisoners, because we’re the kind of people who would care enough about our own to want him back? Is that it?
What the hell have we been fighting for?
What were all those lives traded for?
If we can’t bring one American home alive.
Why do we have the mightiest military in the world? In the history of the world, if we have to live in fear of what the goddamned terrorists think?
If we have to live in terror all of the time.
If we can’t even go to the goddamned grocery store without a gun?
Here’s the really disturbing question:
What does Ted Cruz’s statement tell the US Military?
What does it tell the terrorists? Who cares. The real question is what does it tell America?
That under a Tea Party administration if you’re captured by terrorists, well fuck you, Soldier. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. Our vaunted principles, our inflexible ideology, our unbending politics and our sound-bite simple-minded doctrine is worth more than your life. We don’t negotiate with terrorists (even though we really do, don’t we? Pretty much all of the time). Besides, you’re probably a traitor anyway.
Think about that.
Think about it real hard.
Think about it real hard, especially if you’re the parent of a soldier-age son or daughter.
And then be glad, goddamned glad, that you have a president who was willing to do what it takes to get Bowe Bergdahl home.
Dead or alive, we get our people home, whatever the cost, that’s the one promise that must never be broken.
The day we forget that, the day the fear of “what will the terrorists think” becomes more important to us than that sacred obligation, that’s the day America dies.
Whether or not Bowe Bergdahl is a hero or a deserter or just a hapless fool who screwed up under the enormous pressures of war, he’s still an American.
He’s one of ours and and there’s only one thing to say:
Welcome home, Soldier.
Welcome home.